Assessing fantasy, unearned entitlement

San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro is among the post-election legions predicting a blue Texas in the not so distant future. Reading the same tea leaves, the GOP is pretty much concluding that remaining the white party — OK, the party of mostly aging white males — is a dead-end on a road strewn with bloviated tea bags.

What has followed are pledges of better outreach to the demographic segment of the hour — Latinos.

But what I read into all this is a sense of entitlement — unearned — on the one side and fantasy on the other.

The transition from a Texas in which more than 90,000 of its residents post-election want to secede from the union to a state significantly blue and comfortable with that is built on inexorable population shifts. Texas, already majority-minority, will become more so electorally. All those Latino students in Texas public schools will be old enough to vote some day.

The Democrats plead tradition — that Latinos have voted Democrat and always will.

The Republicans imagine that some socially conservative leanings among Latinos, a change in immigration stance and putting forward Latino candidates will loosen this Democratic stranglehold.

As I said, unearned entitlement and fantasy.

President Barack Obama captured heavily Latino Texas counties such as Bexar and some 70 percent of the Latino vote nationally to win re-election.

But consider: If immigration is the defining issue, Latinos just helped re-elect a president who deported more immigrants than his predecessor.

That he succeeded with Latinos in this election is testament to two things.

First, the other side's searing rhetoric made the guy with record deportation numbers seem milquetoast. This was a notion helped along with an all-too-limited quasi-DREAM Act.

Second, immigration, though serving well as a looking glass into either a politician's capacity for compassion or xenophobia, isn't the only issue for Latinos. Education and the economy loom larger, I think.

And Democrats, with pledges of investment in people, do have an edge. At some point, however, being the lesser of evils will not be good enough. And then this entitlement will have been earned. Or not.

The GOP basis for its fantasy? First, there is the belief that, because abortion is such a trumping issue with other segments, it will be so with a significant number of Latinos, too.

No. See election 2012. And a kinder and gentler immigration stance alone won't woo everyone either. Not if every other word is about deficit reduction and the need to cut federal investment.

A Latino face won't be enough either. Just ask Quico Canseco, who toed the party line and is soon to be former congressman from Texas, losing to a Latino Democrat. And Cuban American Ted Cruz apparently didn't get to that holy grail — 40 percent of Latino vote — to become Texas' new U.S. senator. He got 35 percent, according to polling by ImpreMedia/Latino. That won't be enough in future elections.

Look at this another way. Women also played a major role in how this election turned out. But if any woman will do, it would now be President-elect Michele Bachmann.

Not convinced that Latinos can think beyond hot buttons or a Spanish surname? Consider San Antonio as a microcosm. Comfortably majority Latino, voters in the city approved the mayor's initiative for early childhood education because of overwhelming support from urban — i.e. Latino — precincts and despite opposition in suburban white precincts.

The GOP in a sense is asking Latinos to adapt to it. They pledge some changes around the margins and trust that we'll come around. San Antonio adapted to its Latino voters.